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Why You Need a Content Management System—Now

Digital assets are an increasingly important currency for every enterprise, regardless of industry, enabling them to connect and transact with buyers, suppliers, and partners.

We define digital assets as content with a right to use that’s intended to be stored and then consumed on digital appliances. Assets can be structured (information parsed from documents) or unstructured (audio, video, text, images, emails, blogs, and social data sitting outside enterprise firewalls).

The complexity of digital content increases as it moves through the enterprise, being modified across divisions and workflows. The content has to be parsed, tagged, collated, consolidated, integrated, and fed to downstream systems. Once validated and published, the content must be disseminated to a geographically diverse workforce, partners and suppliers, and customers.

The solution is a content management system (CMS) that collects, manages, and publishes digital assets. Today, this tool is an essential part of any enterprise’s overall digital strategy.

Understanding user communities

Because enterprises are so diverse and divisions so siloed, it’s difficult to develop streamlined workflows around content creation, validation, and dissemination. Often, each enterprise division develops its own CMS, isolated from other workflows. The result is confusion, lack of content timeliness, and difficulty assessing the ROI of marketing campaigns.

Successfully designing and implementing a content management system begins with understanding how the content will be consumed by the various user communities. For example, content that is easy to consume cuts down on call-center volumes and enhances customer satisfaction. Similarly, content with a distinctive visual design that represents your brand helps ensure deeper engagement and customer loyalty. On a practical level, content that adapts to multiple devices and operating systems will lead to wider viewership.

Ideally, your CMS should store reusable site components in a single repository that can be selected, assembled, and syndicated across multiple sites. The design should facilitate content conversion, package configuration, customization, and workflow automation. Consider that deep integration of the content with ecommerce functionality will ensure higher online transaction volume and higher value transactions. An embedded marketing automation module helps synchronize campaigns around product and pricing mixes.

Your CMS framework should provide pre-built accelerators and plug-ins for a variety of related products in the marketplace and integration into your existing IT systems. It should also enable a rapid multi-device, multi-OS rollout of content to ensure ubiquitous access for user communities.

Combined, these features will create a CMS platform that showcases relevant, timely, dynamic content while engaging users and making it easy for them to navigate, find meaningful content, transact online, and build greater affinity for your brand.